Peace and the general strike

The munitions industry relied on women workers. Courtesy of the Imperial War Museum.

Lloyd George’s coalition Government won the 1918 general election overwhelmingly - 526 seats against 56 for Labour and 26 Independents - and the Government set about building a ‘land fit for heroes’, with health and education extended, pensions raised and 200,000 houses built in the period 1919 to 1922.

Such growth could not be sustained. The national debt in 1914 was £706 million: six years later it had grown to £7,875 million. Labour unrest grew in a depressed economy, and tough measures were used against strikers including miners, railwaymen and the police.

In Ireland, Sinn Fein had won 73 seats out of 81 in the south and withdrew from Westminster to set up an unofficial Parliament - the Dáil - in Dublin. In 1921 Lloyd George accepted the loss of Ireland, and the Irish Free State came into being the following January.

Lloyd George’s coalition crumbled in the face of attacks by Stanley Baldwin and the Conservatives, and Ramsay MacDonald and Labour. Baldwin won the elections in 1923 and 1924 and - although labour relations had eased since the strikes of 1919 to 1921 - his Government’s decision effectively to reduce miners’ wages led to the General Strike of 1926. From 3 to 12 May, two million men and women stopped work in a peaceful demonstration of solidarity.

Attempts to make tax easier
With income tax now accepted as a necessary part of life, attempts were made to clarify it.

• The Income Tax Act of 1918 consolidated all income tax legislation into one volume, one of the Law Lords commenting of previous legislation ‘no censure could be too strong, I think, for having expressed an Act... in language so involved, so slovenly and so unintelligible as is the language of the Acts of 1842 and 1853’. The language stayed in the consolidated version, however, having proved impossible to change.
• A Royal Commission was set up in 1920 ‘to enquire into the income tax (including super-tax)’ in all its aspects. After 50 sittings and the examination of 200 witnesses, the 100,000 word report proposed changes in detail, but concluded that ‘as it was in 1842, so in its essential features should it remain’. Although the value of Peel’s 1842 legislation was noted, the real credit is to Addington’s Act of 1803.
• In 1927 Chancellor Winston Churchill set up the Income Tax Codification Committee to condense the 800 provisions of 19 different Acts, and the decisions of 1,800 court cases, into a single code. It reported in 1936, but - with the Second World War intervening - was not considered in detail until 1952. By then a further fifteen Finance Acts had been passed, and there were a further six volumes of reported cases to consider. Despite some revolutionary proposals, the attempt had failed.